Chris Anderson interviews Sam Altman at TED 2025
I just finished watching TED’s Chris Anderson conversation with OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman at TED 2025.
It’s clear that Altman, besides being an incredibly smart person, is not someone who tries to please the audience. He was pretty hermetic about many of important things that Anderson asked him. Also, and many times seems annoyed when Anderson nudges him a bit with more spicy questions. For example, when Anderson questions him about his core values, Altman quickly switches to explain what OpenAI’s goals are.
Even so, the interview is worth watching. Altman is the CEO of one of the companies in the center of the AI revolution, and continues at pushing the fronteer of AI very month if not every week.
One thing that Altman said that totally resonated: AI is now part of the world and there is no way of stopping it, like if it were the discovery of fundamental physics. It will get better and better. As any new technology, there are great things but also new problems which we as a society will need to figure out.
(26:25) I totally understand looking at this and saying this is an unbelievable change coming to the world. And, you know, maybe I don’t want this, or maybe I love parts of it. Maybe I love talking to ChatGPT, but I worry about what’s going to happen to art, and I worry about the pace of change, and I worry about these agents clicking around the internet. And maybe, on balance, I wish this weren’t happening. Or maybe I wish it were happening a little slower. Or maybe I wish it were happening in a way where I could pick and choose what parts of progress were going to happen. And I think, the fear is totally rational. Sort of, the anxiety is totally rational. We all have a lot of it, too. But …
A, there will be tremendous upside. Obviously, you know, you use it every day, you like it.
B … I really believe that society figures out, over time, with some big mistakes along the way, how to get technology right.
And C, this is going to happen. This is like a discovery of fundamental physics that the world now knows about. And it’s going to be part of our world.
And I think this conversation is really important. I think talking about these areas of danger [is] really important to talk about. New economic models are really important. But we have to embrace this with like, caution but not fear, or we will get run by with other people that use AI to do better.
Worth watching. (Here’s the link to the TED Talk and transcript.)